Clara becomes increasingly anxious over this development. They appear to be incomprehensible scribblings compared to his previous highly controlled and intellectual style. The next stop brings them to Peter's sister and there they find some paintings that he has sent his niece. This character is important to the theme of madness and chaos which permeates this novel. There they found out that Peter visited a former professor, Paul Massey, asking after the mysterious Professor Norman, a maverick professor long gone from the college.

Peter's first stop on his quest was to the Ontario College of Art where both he and Clara obtained their degrees. Artistic angst or rivalry is at the basis of the couple's separation. Clara and her friend Myrna, the local bookstore owner, join Armand and Jean-Guy in reconstructing Peter's steps in what turns out to be his desperate quest to reinvent himself as an artist. There is also a nod given to the discovery that Peter's search led him to Paris and the Garden of Cosmic Delights, the mathematics-themed garden near Dumfries in Scotland. The search for Peter takes us from Toronto to Quebec's Charlevoix region and further down river to the Lower North Shore, to an area so desolate that the first settlers called it the Land God Gave to Cain. When Peter fails to show up, Clara fears that something has happened to him. The couple had separated with the understanding that they would meet and decide about their future in a year's time. Not a murder but a disappearance marshals the efforts of Gamache with his protégé and son-in law Jean-Guy Beauvoir, in helping Clara, the village artist, search for her missing husband Peter, also an artist. Her cast of characters is now well established and the primary action in this novel centres on the interaction among them.

While Penny's series might be described as both a police procedural and a village cozy, the latter category has taken over in THE LONG WAY HOME. Gamache is recovering from the gunshot he received in the dramatic conclusion of the previous novel which I enjoyed more than this present story. This tenth book in Penny's Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series finds the inspector happily retired in Three Pines, Penny's version of an English village set in the Eastern Townships of Quebec.

The long way home book louise penny